Why Are Sports Important? July 15, 2006
Posted by TimTheFoolMan in Coaching, Education, Exercise, Family, Football, Parenting/Children, Sports.trackback
I have an ecclectic collection of friends. Some of them are “into” sports, but many are not. Invariably, the friends who are not involved in sports (either themselves or by way of their children) are baffled by my love and passion for most any type of sport.
The current issue of Stanford Magazine, a publication of the Stanford Alumni Association, has a series of interesting articles about kids, parenting, and raising/rearing children today. One of my favorite articles is titled “Good Sports,” and captures many of the reasons that I find sports involvement for kids to be such a crucial component for my sons.
Below is my favorite quote:
“Finally, most important of all, the whole point of coaching, the whole point of kids in organized sport: teach them to love the game, to love to play. The only measure of success for a coach is if the kids come back to play the next year. If they don’t return for a second season, you weren’t a good enough coach, period.
By this measure, I’ve been a successful coach, every year.
A Fool and his Words are Soon Parted 
I don’t know how much you follow soccer but nonetheless the Zidane head butt in the finals with Italy has the internet swamped with video of it. If you want a laugh visit our blog for the various mashups of the event. There is also a link to the Sydney Morning Herald which has some You Tube video. from one blogger to another….
http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/?p=1383
I wish I could get my daughter to be interested in sports, but she just isn’t. I believe it’s important to be involved in sports because it teaches you to work together as a team, something my daughter needs extra help with since she’s an only child. But she participates in sports “kicking and screaming.” Maybe I need to coach the field hockey team to enhance her interest. Any other suggestions?
If only that was the ruler most measured team sport success with perhaps we would have fewer sad cases at the college and pro level.
Sportsmanship is defined as “conduct and attitude considered as befitting participants, including a sense of fair play, courtesy toward teammates and opponents, a striving spirit, and grace in losing.”
The motivation for sport is often an elusive element. For example, beginners in sailing are often told that dinghy racing is a good means to sharpen the learner’s sailing skills. However, it often emerges that skills are honed to increase racing performance and achievements in competition, rather than the converse. Sportsmanship expresses an aspiration or ethos that the activity will be enjoyed for its own sake. The well-known sentiment by sports journalist Grantland Rice, that it’s “not that you won or lost but how you played the game,” and the Modern Olympic creed expressed by its founder Pierre de Coubertin: “The most important thing . . . is not winning but taking part” are typical expressions of this sentiment.
But often the pressures of competition or an obsession with individual achievement—as well as the intrusion of technology—can all work against enjoyment and fair play by participants.
People responsible for leisure activities often seek recognition and respectability as sports by joining sports federations such as the IOC, or by forming their own regulatory body. In this way sports evolve from leisure activity to more formal sports: relatively recent newcomers are BMX cycling, snowboarding, and wrestling. Some of these activities have been popular but uncodified pursuits in various forms for different lengths of time. Indeed, the formal regulation of sport is a relatively modern and increasing development.
i am very interesting of the sports because it’s important to the men and the women